


from which stars have we fallen

by Razzaroo



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-24 15:05:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16177562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razzaroo/pseuds/Razzaroo
Summary: Jergen, omens, and the building up of lost boys





	from which stars have we fallen

**Author's Note:**

> I made some comments once about Jergen and his grimy feral children being the ideal Skyrim family and then I took it seriously.
> 
> I know Vilkas says in game that Jergen was killed in the Great War but the game guide says it was brigands near Dawnstar so I'm opting for the second because it gives me more wiggle room with my timeline, which is held together with glue and the power of prayer, much like Bethesda games.

The winter draws in closer, chasing out the last lingering colours of autumn, and Jergen finds himself watching the stars. The Atronach gives way to the Thief and the stars themselves burn brighter and bolder on winter’s crisp canvas. It’s the stars that draw his eyes but not his thoughts; those, he finds, dwell on the twins, two cubs he leaves curled underneath bearskin when duty and coin’s song calls him away.

Winter-born, Tilma had said, being so small and wraithlike when he’d carried them into Jorrvaskr and she’d said it in such a way he could only assume she didn’t have high hopes. Born in winter, when even the fierce bears sleep and the plants stand bare and the river stills.

They won’t last, Eir had said, and maybe Jergen should have listened. She is, after all, a mother herself and knows how children thrive: by being born in spring, like Aela was.

Still, Jergen has never been a good listener.

The night grows old around him and the Thief bears down, laughing his way across the sky as Jergen slips into the safety of Whiterun’s walls. The Thief, Jergen remembers, promises luck to those born under him. It is luck that brought the twins to him and luck that had allowed to claw their way through their first winter in Whiterun.

Jorrvaskr greets him with a rush of warmth and amber light and Vilkas, frozen on the spot, rabbit cornered by the wolf. They stand for a moment before Jergen drops his greatsword to the ground and kneels, arms open in invitation. Vilkas clears the ground and buries himself in Jergen’s chest, the cold armour meaningless against the promise of comfort he offers. Jergen rises and says nothing, Vilkas clasped to his chest, small arms locked around his neck and holding him true.

“ _Mit hjerte_ ,” he murmurs, carrying Vilkas into the warm kitchen, full of the smell of meat set to roast through the night. He sets the boy down on the wooden table, “What’s scared you out of bed?”

He waits, as Vilkas gathers his words up from behind his breastbone, shy things that are still uncertain of how they should sound. He warms milk over the fire and catches Vilkas turning words on his tongue.

“Bad dreams,” he says, small child’s voice even smaller in the kitchen, shadows reaching for him from the corners.

Jergen does not need to ask what the dreams are about. It’s always the same, a loop of black robes and black magic and a darkness equipped with claws. There’s tears on his face now, and Jergen presses the cup into his hand, those small fingers wrapping clumsily around it.

“Fear feeds them, Vilkas,” he says, “And they survive on it.”

He forages through the cupboards and comes up with one of Tilma’s honey cakes, something she usually sets aside for the Circle and their unrelenting need for more energy than anyone else. He sits as Vilkas drinks his milk and he lets the boy cry; to ask a child not to cry, he thinks, is like asking the tides not to change or the moons to be always full.

“We shall starve them,” Jergen says. He breaks the cake in half and honey runs out, warm and golden, sticky on his skin, “And they’ll wither away.”

He plants a kiss on Vilkas’s forehead and, with it, a seed that he hopes will grow and envelope the boy in bravery, in thorns, so that no ghosts may touch him.

“If you must be anything,” he says, softly, and his hands are full of Vilkas, one running through that dark thatch of hair. He thinks of wolves, teeth gleaming under the light of the moon, and of sabre cats with the gold catching eyes, “then you must be fierce. So the world cannot touch you.” Their foreheads touch and Vilkas’s small fingers tangle in Jergen’s hair, “And then it cannot hurt you.”

 

* * *

 

Night comes in longer and colder and closer. Jergen turns away more work that takes him far from Whiterun, so that he can ensure he’ll be back with his boys by sundown. The world they make is their own, a small self-contained place within Jorrvaskr that grows out of bearskins and honeyed milk and Jergen’s stories of what lies beyond Whiterun’s walls.

“Let me go with you,” Farkas mumbles against Jergen’s neck when Vilkas is asleep, tucked up like a treasure against Jergen’s hip.

“Soon,” Jergen whispers back, “when the snow slows down.”

He hoards his children for himself through the longest nights of winter, snarling even at Tilma when she comes close. He holds them close, little things with their fluttering, butterfly-beat hearts pressed against his own, and promises to teach them how to use their teeth and claws, how to bend the forest and make it their temple.

The twins were winter-born, Tilma had said, and so Jergen decides they will be winter taught. He’ll show them the tracks of the winter beasts, the running of the winter streams and secrets of where plants hide under the snow. He’ll show his boys the winter stars and how to call them all by name.

For now, though, when the winter storms howl like dogs and the snow blinds even the sun, Jergen teaches them from books, their histories and their legacies, the stories of Skyrim that are written into their blood.

“What’s a Dragonborn?” Vilkas asks and Farkas is plastered to his side, rib to rib, two children cut from the same soul.

“The Dragonborn,” Jergen says and the old story sings somewhere in his bone marrow, “is someone who dragons will speak with.”

“I’ll know one, someday,” Farkas says, only half awake. He looks at Vilkas, “ _We’ll_ know one, someday.”

Jergen can make them no promises that they’ll meet legend made flesh but he makes a note to take them to a dragon mound, when the snows melt, where they can clamber on it and press their ears to the earth and try to hear an ancient voice beneath the dirt which will turn their bones to jelly and send their hearts trembling across the sky.

 

* * *

 

The forest stands black and white when Jergen takes Farkas out into it, the two of them alone as Vilkas lies underneath piles of fur, his lungs struggling and ragged things. He makes Farkas promise to bring him something back, proof of this excursion to the cold and biting woods. Jergen carries Farkas on his back and the boy wonders what he can offer his brother, consolation for leaving him behind.

“You’ll find nirnroot here, in summer,” Jergen says, stopping at the edge of a pool, glassy with ice, “It sings and you’ll see it glowing in the dark.”

Farkas leans forward, his hands against the ice, searching for a glimpse of the glow, the moon in clouded glass. When Jergen moves away, he’s slow to follow, hopping from footprint to footprint to catch up.

One day, Jergen will teach both of them to hunt, to track, to follow signs of life in the bleak black and white world that winter builds. But first, they must learn the world itself and Farkas is one who learns better by doing and seeing than being told.

“It will come to you,” he says, when Farkas trips, stumbles over something hidden under the snow, “You’ll know it like home.” He points out a grove of pines, their branches swinging low and dark, the only trees still cloaked, “Wolfsbane blooms there in the summer. Put it on your blade or your arrows and it will even bring down a werewolf.”

Farkas shudders, “Kodlak says that poison is the worst way to die.”

“There are worse,” Jergen says, thinking of falmer and vampires and frostbite spiders, dark things which hide even when the night is ripe for them, thick with cloud or unlit by the moon, “But we have ways of seeing them.”

He cuts a bundle of holly, the leaves prickling against his wrists, and tucks it into the pocket of Farkas’s coat: for luck, for good dreams and for protection against the whole wide range of the world’s poisons.

 

* * *

 

He shows them swords, when they ask him. How to hold a blade, how to turn it, how to strike fast and true, how to fight with honour.

“Match your opponents, when you can,” he says, “Most people are pretty good when it comes to telling us what they want us to put down.”

Vilkas looks at his feet, then at Farkas who is cradling Jergen’s greatsword like it’s a holy object. He looks small with it, even with a small growth spurt.

“What about mages?” he asks, and there’s the fear again, smaller now but ever haunting.

“Don’t you worry about mages,” Jergen says, “They fall on swords like any men. You learn mages, like you learn all your enemies, and you match them. You just have to be clever. And you _are_ clever.”

“Hitting them works too,” Farkas chimes in, “Like Eir says you did.”

He touches the skyforged steel with something like reverence, as close as a child can come to it, and Jergen can’t tell if it’s the weapon he admires or what it’s made of.

“You’ll have your own, one day,” he says, “when you’re older and big enough to hold them. I’ll get you practice ones before, when you pick a name day.” He grins at their puzzling looks, one identical expression on two faces, “You don’t know it so it’s whichever one you like; you choose.”

 

* * *

 

Time trudges on and the months, season by season, and the stars whirl overhead. Summer comes suddenly. Jergen reads omens in his tea leaves and the murmurs in the trees. When Kodlak offers him the wolf’s blood, he takes it; if there’s monsters on the horizon, he’ll match them, match their teeth and their strength.

“They say there’ll be a war,” Arnbjorn says and there’s already silver shot through his dark eyes.

Jergen doesn’t answer. The world is overwhelming and too close. He can smell Arnbjorn, all salt and steel and leather, flesh and breath and bone. The thud of Eir’s arrows rings in his ears and his teeth feel too big, too sharp for his mouth.

That night, Jergen runs through the forests, with eyes that match the golden hunter’s moon. The night air drips with summer, the promise of warm rain, the thick smell of flowering trees. The world runs in cycles, the seasons and the moon and the way forests always grow back, over and over.

‘ _This is the world,’_ he thinks, wolf-teeth dripping red, wolf-eyes full of the moon, man’s mind full of his sons, ‘ _its beginning and end, cradle and grave, and it will all be yours when I am gone.’_

 

* * *

 

Years give way to years. Arnbjorn is sent away from the Companions and Jorrvaskr, though there’s no disgrace because that would require Arnbjorn’s shame; the war he predicted doesn’t start but it does hum ominously, a lantern left burning with no eyes to watch it. Farkas and Vilkas grow taller and Whiterun takes notice, new blood starting the road to become new adults. Jergen holds his tongue and bites back comments that none of Whiterun’s daughters will be good enough for his sons. He will not give them up to people who expect them to be soldiers or tradesmen or any number of things that will put collars on their necks.

They follow him when the winter comes again, still stepping in his footprints even though they’re thirteen and old enough to start venturing on their own. The three of them stop by a frozen pond and Jergen watches as Farkas shows Vilkas how to fish through a hole cut in the ice. The air hangs thick, the long night settling over Skyrim again, and the moon drains everything it touches of colour except for the stars. Their brightness is livid, robbed of the two boys whose lives they had written to be short, struggling things.

Jergen defies them and writes his own stars, stitches them to Farkas and Vilkas, an intricate tapestry that might be called love if Jergen was the kind to use such words.

“Why are they so close?” Vilkas asks once the fishing line is set. Farkas follows him and curls up in the shelter of holly and ivy and yew that Jergen’s bent into shape.

“Maybe because they have something to say,” Jergen says, “Name them for me?”

Vilkas does, knowing the names and stories of the constellations as well as his own, and the stars seem to shiver and rattle in response. Through the fire’s smoke, Jergen sees black wings against the night sky, shadow cast over that arc of silver.

Jergen watches as the moon makes her way across the sky, listening to the night noises of the forest, beast blood warming him through those long hours. He’s content in this space the three of them have carved out of the world. Alduin could come and close his jaws around Skyrim, Tamriel, all of Nirn, and the three of them would remain, still in their forest and under their stars.

 

* * *

 

“It’s a shame they’re growing apart.”

Jergen twitches. Fralia Gray-Mane is a good woman and has two sons of her, which naturally means she understands all sons. Farkas watches Eorlund work the skyforge with more attention than he’s ever paid Vignar, while Vilkas has left them both to roam outside Whiterun’s walls, looking to run his blood into the ground. To any outsider, it would seem they’re growing away from each other but Jergen sees how they always come back together at night, constant companions; they were never meant to be apart.

“They’ll find each other again,” he says. His skin prickles and he catches a scent on the air that tells him that Vilkas is returning.

Vilkas appears around Jorrvaskr, spattered in blood, stag’s pelt hung from one shoulder. Fralia draws back, mouth tight, fingers curling down, when he presents Jergen the antlers.

“Fur for you,” he says, when Jergen touches the pelt, “for the winter and your old bones.” Already, there’s something wolfish in his smile.

“Payment, then,” Jergen says, as Farkas abandons the skyforge in favour of his brother. He stands, runs his hand through Vilkas’s dark hair, contrast to Jergen’s fair, and finds it stiff with blood, “for all those winters I sheltered you.”

Farkas picks up the antlers, turns them over in his hands, and doesn’t question how his brother ended up so bloody. Jergen’s proud of them, his grey-eyed cubs, fierce wild-hearted apples of his eye.

“I’ll make you somethin’,” Farkas says, seeking unspoken approval in Jergen’s face. He closes Vilkas’s fingers around the antlers, holds them closed, “Somethin’ just for you. Somethin’ that fits.”

 

* * *

 

“Would you let them take it?”

There’s a melancholy in Kodlak, with the night moonless outside and Jergen his only company. Jergen looks deep into his cup before he downs the lot, honey sweet mead sticking to his teeth and the back of his throat.

“Let them take what?”

“The blood.”

Jergen pauses and considers. He’s used the gift well, he thinks, to guard his sons from the monsters that lurk at the edges of the map, of their lives. But all of it, the strength and the guards against sickness, comes with a bite, the ache in his bones, how tired he is each morning after running the wilds, more than a mere sleepless night would leave him.

“Their choice,” he says, “They’ve seen it, they’re old enough to make their own decisions now.”

“It’s for life. And the afterlife.”

Jergen lets his breath go, because he knows that tone, and then he looks at Kodlak. He thinks of the twins and how they are not meant to be shackled, locked down to one thing or another, and closes his eyes before he speaks.

“What do you need me to do?”

 

* * *

 

It’s easy to find answers, if one knows where to look. Jergen finds an expert in daedra, a witch near Dawnstar who wears her hair in knots, one for each long year of her life. She grins with grey teeth, like pebbles cast out from a river, and tells him she has no fondness for the Glenmoril coven.

“Take their heads,” she says and makes a wide swinging motion, imitating a sword, “And burn them. It will break your pact with them.” She picks her teeth with a glass dagger, jewelled hilt glittering in the firelight, “And make room for me.”

It’s like the fairy tales he used to tell Farkas and Vilkas when they were small enough to both fit in his lap, his arms, small enough that he was a father who could hold the world back. The witches of their childhood had been different beasts, clad in dark robes and waited on by shades of the living, not hunched feathered things.

The heroes in their stories always ran out of monsters by the end.

“What happens when we run out of witches?”

“It means you run out of cures.”

He emerges into early morning, the sunrise warming the horizon, a red band settled around the world and lit like a brand. Once, his father had said something about red mornings and weather, stood watching over the shaggy herd of sheep he’d grown up raising. His life has revolved around omens and warnings, written in clouds and starlight, signs of life passing in the woods, honour and stone, smell of silver in the air.

He stops, his blood burns, and he turns with sword in hand. Those following him stop, silver as frost, as the stars that had led him to his sons. He grins, all teeth, and leans in to show them how hard it is to kill a wolf.

The sun stains the sky red and Jergen knows he’s going to die. Life’s breath and life’s blood spills into the world, last thing he’ll leave on the last gift to his sons, the measure of a man howled at the sky as the Thief turns his face away.

 

* * *

 

Funeral fires burn hot and Kodlak wishes he could throw grief into the flames, burn it away along with Jergen, send it up to the stars in a plume of smoke and sparks that bite where they touch the skin. He wishes he could take it from Farkas and Vilkas, use it to rebuild their father into a man of flesh and blood, tell them that it was his fault and his fool errand _forgive me forgive me forgive me_

But he can’t and he doesn’t. He watches as the pair retreat, draw back into themselves and their own world. Farkas’s hands are restless but can’t keep up with his brother’s restless heart; when Vilkas takes to the wildwood, Farkas follows him, spur of the moment, split second of fear that he’s losing his brother too.

“They’ll come back,” Tilma says in her quiet, confident way that keeps Jorrvaskr standing, “This is their home.”

 Half a home, Kodlak thinks. The other half lies outside of Whiterun’s walls, tangled in roots and branches, watches with eyes hidden in the underbrush. Jergen had always made sure they’d survive, if they lost themselves. Now, Kodlak only worries that _he’s_ lost _them_.

It’s three more days before his fears are settled.

The pair of them come back at night and Kodlak only notices because they leave Jergen’s door open, left ajar for light to come out. He sees them curled up on the bed, tangled up in each other, a sixteen year old tangle of limbs and a lifetime and shared grief, the measure of Jergen and the Companions written in the lines of them. Jergen’s belongings lie in a pile on the floor: greatsword, short sword, shield, all of them discarded for the older comforts of childhood.

Kodlak pulls the door closed, content to let them be, glad to have them back, ready for them to emerge from their world in their own time. There’d always be someone in Jorrvaskr ready to welcome them back.

It is, after all, what family is for.


End file.
